Facebook Live Adds Audio-Only for Citizen Radio

Radio was a major innovation in society, a tool that allowed the average person to learn of news around the world and hear the stories of others, fiction and non-fiction.

This is something Facebook is now embracing in their Live Audio tool, a way to stream directly from your phone but only audio. It is an expansion of Facebook Live Video and Live 360, which allows you to stream 360 degree video.

As audio can be played in the background, users are able to start streaming and then switch to other apps just like any other music player.

Facebook will be launching this with several partners, including BBC and Harper Collins. This offers a way to move radio and live audio to a modern age. This had started with podcasts, although this could enable citizen journalism to extend to more types of scenarios. Some comic artists stream live when they draw their comics before posting the final result the next day. The same could be done by podcasters before publishing the edited result. This allows the audience to engage directly with the content creators as things are being streamed.

Another benefit is allowing more users to stream live. Video streaming requires more bandwidth than audio alone, and this could make streaming more accessible.

Nick Felker is a student Electrical & Computer Engineering student at Rowan University (C/O 2017) and the student IEEE webmaster. When he's not studying, he is a software developer for the web and Android (Felker Tech). He has several open source projects on GitHub (http://github.com/fleker)
Devices: Moto G-2013 Moto G-2015, Moto 360, Google ADT-1, Nexus 7-2013 (x2), Lenovo Laptop, Custom Desktop.
Although he was an intern at Google, the content of this blog is entirely independent and his own thoughts.